Looks good, I remember a friend had a similar idea when Win95 came out to replace the start menu: a ring in the middle of the screen with arcs you could move the mouse through to drill down the "hierarchy". Think he had some rude name for it, I'm sure you can guess..

Hi Josh,
great approach (I already liked it the last time) and already a great implementation. A real achievement and I am already looking forward to how this will move on.
(#sent unsolicited#) If you plan to use the same system for commanding other vessels, it might be a nice addition to add numbers to the nodes (0-9) to navigate the dials resp. drilling the menus. If you ever played the X-series for some time you might know that this could be a great shortcut (e.g. mining is 1-4-1) which saves a lot of time and preserves mechanical energy.
Besides the verbose property lists a limitation to around seven to nine items may enhance the readability of the menu (even if 7+/-2 seems to be a myth: http://uxmyths.com/post/931925744/myth-23-choices-should-always-be-limited-to-seven).
Thinking of it and looking at the keypad the interface might even adapt to that spatially where the 5 could navigate upwards and 0 might be free for another function.
Sorry, if I got carried away.
You project is probably the best spent money on kickstarter, yet.

While you've certainly made a very good tree view that is very impressive I don't think it's good for "everything". It's easy to overlook things when excited about something new.

Specifically trees are only good for hierarchical data. What happens when a piece of data belongs to more than one category? It all comes tumbling, tumbling down. So you'll probably want to consider that case if and most likely when it comes up.

Because of this I am personally an advocate of flat and tag based. In a tag based system you can easily drill down what you want by combining only a few tags and seeing only the content that belongs to all of the categories you are interested in. No piece of data has to belong exclusively to "higher" node, all is equal.

(It is also for this reason that I am opposed to OOP, but that's another story.)

The other case you might want to consider is how to find a piece of data if you don't know where it is. Essentially how do you search the data you are looking at? Vista if anything has shown just how powerful a search based interface can actually be. A logical hierarchy or logical tags surely help but sometimes it's not reliable. Consider this case.

I am very impressed with your design of the nodal interface. I am curious how it might function as a replacement for side-by-side comparisons that often employ the linear interface.

e.g. when switching out equipment on your ship, instead of having to drill through the properties after the replacement, the UI provides some visual of the effect on the properties during inspection. Yes, I am thinking along the lines RPG games with their +5 dex or -1 AC.

or even just comparing two ships. do all my fighters have the same weapons systems, propulsion, etc or do I still need to upgrade something?